Interview with the DevPortalAwards winners

The goal of the DevPortal Awards is to recognize the best developer portals and learn from their practices. In our previous post we already shared the jury’s reasoning for choosing the winners, but of course we were thrilled to hear the opinion of the other side, the teams that made their portal an awarded success!

Best new DX innovation, Best community spotlight & outreach, Best overall developer portal jury prize

We are always working to provide the best resources and experience for our 500,000 developers. This award is meaningful because it means we are on the right track for helping our community do their best work.
It will also have positive impact on our whole Cisco DevNet team. Having their work recognized as an award-winning dev portal is very motivating and encouraging and will help them to strive to continue to provide the best quality of work and best experience.

The scope of our dev portal has expanded a lot. It's not only a place for finding all resources and engaging with community, but also a platform with integrated dev tools to make development easy and fast, and a journey with a route to market so that developers can monetize their solutions. To connect all of these audience needs with a great experience is not easy. Hence, this year we have a strong focus on building amazing end-to-end developer experience. We are going to be spending time on DX review and pinpointing where we want to improve the experience. We are also looking at ways to simplify our journey to get developers to the information they need faster.

The aim of the Awards is to recognize, celebrate and learn from the world’s greatest developer portals and their API documentation. Have you seen solutions and best practices that you would use or follow later?

We are interested in approaches that different portals use to organize their API documentation based on use cases and business directives. We also admired the value proposition examples from TomTom, CapitalOne, and Nexmo. It's nice to see direct getting started examples such as the one for SendGrid which lets a developer send an email quite quickly. We also plan to learn from all of the other nominees and winners from this award program. We feel that they offer much to learn from in each category.

Other thoughts you'd like to share?

We would like to say thank you for creating this award program. Creating great developer portals is a hard and complicated endeavor that requires user empathy, technical acumen, and business insight. It is fantastic to see this award program recognize this kind of work, and to highlight examples of great work that we can all use to learn and improve.

Getting peer recognition of the work that you do is always an honour. As a company and a team that strives to put developers front of mind in everything we do, winning awards for on-boarding, reference documentation and maintenance really solidifies that we're doing things the right way.

The Dev Portal Awards nominees represent the absolute finest in Developer Portals so we've been able to take away learnings not just from talking with members of the jury, but by understanding how and why other teams won the categories they did.

The aim of the Awards is to recognize, celebrate and learn from the world’s greatest developer portals and their API documentation. Have you seen solutions and best practices that you would use or follow later?

We're always looking to improve the work we do around the portal so we'll be taking these wins as a sign of what we need to double down on alongside introducing some new, exciting elements in 2019 that will see the Nexmo developer experience jump to the next level.

Best decision maker documentation

This award is great recognition of our approach to bundle data as API products to cater real use cases. It is another important recognition that API products are the right way to convince business stakeholders. Since we center our efforts around innovating and designing new API products to extend our offering, the award is a great appreciation for the team and our internal stakeholders, too.

Best decision maker documentation: Deutsche Bank API program

What are your portal plans for the future?

Our developer portal will also cover the PSD2 interfaces that banks are required to provide under European regulation. In addition, we are strongly committed to expanding our premium API products that go beyond regulation.

The aim of the Awards is to recognize, celebrate and learn from the world’s greatest developer portals and their API documentation. Have you seen solutions and best practices that you would use or follow later?

It would not be fair to highlight one single company name. Throughout the conference, we saw a few great solutions that inspired us to improve our own offering.

Other thoughts you'd like to share?

Thank you for the initiating the conference and this award on a topic that will become even more important over the next years. My colleagues and I really enjoyed it. It was great to meet and learn from so many people that share the same spirit and belief in APIs.

Best API business model

We couldn’t be more excited to win Best API Business Model. Our primary goal when designing developers.shopify.com was to highlight the amazing business opportunity that Shopify offers to developers. This year we reached $100M in cumulative payouts to our developers and we wanted to share this milestone in a creative way. We’re so happy that DevPortal Awards recognized us for this effort.

Best API business model: Shopify Developers

What are your portal plans for the future?

We plan to invest in developer resources to lower the barrier to learning the Shopify API and building a successful business on the Shopify App Store. We also plan to invest in the app capabilities to give developers even more opportunities to innovate on our platform.

The aim of the Awards is to recognize, celebrate and learn from the world’s greatest developer portals and their API documentation. Have you seen solutions and best practices that you would use or follow later?

Generally speaking, I’m fond of developer portals that help developers get started with the API in minutes. This approach gives developers an opportunity to play around with the API and learn quickly. It also gives developers instant gratification, which helps them maintain motivation.

Other thoughts you'd like to share?

It’s amazing to see developer portals recognized like this. Thank you DevPortal Awards for making this happen!

Best design

The design of this page was a collaborative effort between designers, developers, and documentarians, and it’s great to see that the result of that collaboration is so well-received.

Best design: Mapbox Documentation

What are your portal plans for the future?

As the Mapbox suite of products grows and evolves, our developer portal will need to keep up! We believe that the pattern that we’ve created is extensible, but we know that there will be interesting products that push the category boundaries. Our challenge will be to incorporate them into the developer portal in a way that makes them discoverable for users.

The aim of the Awards is to recognize, celebrate and learn from the world’s greatest developer portals and their API documentation. Have you seen solutions and best practices that you would use or follow later?

Mapbox has a very broad range of products in many different categories, and we cater to developers working on a lot of different platforms. On top of that, the mapping technology sector deals with different concerns than most other verticals. So when we were thinking about patterns for our developer portal, there weren’t really any existing solutions that met our needs.

It was important for us to keep our users top-of-mind while we designed our developer portal. Mapbox, just like any other company, organizes its products internally in a certain way. But we know from user interviews and feedback that our internal product hierarchy isn’t necessarily how most developers think of our products. So we spent a lot of time thinking about categories that would be meaningful to our users. We let that information guide the categories that we created for the developer portal.

Any other thoughts you'd like to share?

We frequently share best practice guides such as The Guide to Map Design by Amy Lee Walton released earlier this year. We will soon be issuing a series of white papers outlining best practices in several key areas: transportation and logistics, BI and data visualization, and consumer mobile application design. We will also offer tutorials and webinars. Developers and designers tell us what we need, and we create the products and tools for them to build it. Feel free to send us feedback – our goal is to support builders in understanding the world of possibilities with live location mapping and data visualization. Stay tuned!

Best overall developer portal, community prize

Winning this prize in particular makes our team very proud, because we truly care about our community. Our daily work is 100% focused on providing the best experience to the developers who use our API, so we take this award as a great encouragement to continue along this path!

In the coming month, we plan to revamp our platform to become an even more caring developer portal. We will answer developers' immediate needs with tutorials, guides, news and support, but also inspire them and lead them to explore new possibilities they may have never thought of.

The aim of the Awards is to recognize, celebrate and learn from the world’s greatest developer portals and their API documentation. Have you seen solutions and best practices that you would use or follow later?

Congratulations to Cisco's team, who won the Jury vote! We love their upcoming events map, that's a great idea.

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About the author

Anett Pozsár

Junior Technical Writer

Anett is a Junior Technical Writer at Pronovix. As a member of the content team, she writes user guides and website content, does peer-reviews and often takes care of the company’s bi-weekly devportal newsletter. Her background is a mixture of literature and linguistics studies seasoned with some IT, so she loves experimenting with different technologies, such as language linting and documentation testing tools.